Wednesday, November 30, 2016

In order to run away from trimp, the busgus has put a gun to zoback's head to declare victory and run home. They used every trick in the book, techniques made famous by the gormings. We won't go into them here, you're either in the Scientific Method Choir or you aren't.

This is the all-clear to stop watery oil extraction, and go full-blast into fracking. Canadians should invest heavily into heavy oil stocks. 'Nuff said, signing out.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

My single point of reference has become two. I don't think I'll get any more because the agents hide everything. We won't get any real news for another month or two.

The house up the street which was a pure spec play, since all they did was fix it up, and try to sell it empty, has withdrawn from the market. They, like everybody, hope for a Happy Spring. Ain't gonna happen.

Tromp has tromped all over the bond market, and all the hot money is going into US stocks. Canada is looking at free oil, and a vanishing loonie. The big Oklahoma earthquakes better come soon, but after trimp scraps all the oil tankers. Then they'll have to buy Canadian dirty oil, which is a lot cleaner than earthquake oil. :)

Without the hot money the Housing Emperor has no clothes. My relatives will be fine to move to Huntsville in the Spring because the whole country will be in a panic. If somebody offers you a 20% discount on your house, and you are strung out, take it!

There will be no news in condo-land because the paper developments will just disappear 'until Spring'.

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Dear Don, I know you want to increase fracking by 100 times or so. Then you can leave the whole Middle East to your Ruskie buddy. But I'm warning you, you'll unleash disaster for the whole Midwest if you don't do a bit of physics. And I really can't see you and the missus commiserating and organizing relief efforts. You never gave to charity in your life, and she would get her shoes scuffed.

Best that you nip this whole earthquake thing in the bud. I can do it for a mere million dollars, petty change compared to all the money you'll make as president. We just have to treat the water a little bit and all the earthquakes will go away, and you can frack to your heart's content.

Friday, November 25, 2016

And the strain field is setting off New Madrid. I had predicted earlier that we'll get a 6 before Christmas, but if this keeps up, who knows? The busgus just have a huge estimate for the Texas oil shale, and you know how they get that oil. Also, Queen Mary, gov of OK, may be in charge of the busgus, or maybe Sarah herself. Big Newt hates the busgus. Get the CV's polished up, boys.

Monday, November 21, 2016

Every winky-dinky house consultant will try to impress you with a thermal camera.

Now that thermal cameras come with phones, we can all do it, and find that's it's useless. Nearly all heat loss trouble comes from air leakage inward. Then it goes out the chimney. Putting more insulation in the roof doesn't do much. I got the first big improvement from replacing the upper windows and the front door. Get casements only, no sliders. Casements and the magnetic door seal like a fridge.

Then the next big improvement, back door and basement windows hardly made any difference. The physics probably involves the cold air directly hitting the floor and going to the furnace. I also leave some ventilation for the furnace. If all is good, then you never need a humidifier, normal showers and dishwashing is enough.

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Took me forever! But keeps the brain alzie-free. :) Now I can pile on as many super-cheap accelerometers as I want. Yeah! I should be able to come up with something that pinpoints the real farter, and not the dog. :)

Friday, November 18, 2016

Dear Diary, today is November 18, 2016. You won't believe it as you freeze in another ice age advance, that today it's 18oC, and we are having lunch on the patio. You're patio is probably enclosed, now that you have hardly any summer. I feel sorry for you, but ha, ha, people today think that global warming is here forever. They forget we are in a temporary interglacial.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

Oh man, I love 'daily mail' headlines. This is 'official' by me, and me only. It's from the Unionville situation. Only the bargain hunters are offering now, they are hoping that 30% is enough, and not going to 50%. I had suggested to the cbc that they should look at this, but they'll never touch it. They'll wait for the agents to report, and they never will.

All the bank stress tests are at 20% - Ha! This is 'blood in the streets' time, which my cheap investor friend always said was time to buy. I think we are going for a big dip, because everybody is so strung out. In a month all the big new condo projects will fold. The foreign buyers will walk away from their deposits, leaving the banks with the empty bag.

** if you are upset, don't believe me. :)

ps. We believe they may have walked away from the shoddy fix and sell job back of us. And so it begins.

pps. Whoops! Just a different intensity of effort.

Final - the single offer ended at 20% The hot money is gone, the crowd seems more like income investors, so the price will go with the rents.

Wednesday, November 16, 2016

These earthquakes are along an unmapped 'blind thrust' fault. They are the absolute worst faults in the world. This last earthquake had all the settlements on the footwall, so it wasn't bad, except on deep soil. The next one will be worse.

Napier is all soil, and it's on the hanging wall. If that section goes, it's total wipe-out. Fortunately, the marching order isn't 'cast in stone'. Could be in a couple of years (most likely), or not in our lifetimes. If I were there, I'd start putting everything on screw piles.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

I shall call this camera ‘The Beast’, since it’s so thick and heavy. Don’t worry about microphone or speaker quality, this magnum should never leave it’s shoulder harness. It’s generally equivalent to my old Nexus 4.

But that is not its intention -- this a camera for the Professional Engineer. A contractor or a worker would be better off with a Nexus 5x and an Otter case. No, this phone was made for one thing -- it’s unbelievable thermal FLIR camera. A separate thermal camera of this quality is over $10,000 on Amazon.

I am a retired engineer, so it is appropriate that I test this camera. Almost any ‘trouble’ that a field engineer might come across has a thermal signature. In the first picture I can tell immediately that my dog is healthy by the black (cold) nose. I did a video, since that was impossible with the old thermal cameras. The second is my pressure cooker, looking fine.

Of course you can do houses, but there is so much more. I spent half an hour trying to find hot resistors on a board. Had to use my fingers - Ouch! You can easily find hot bearings.

But I am a geotechnical engineer. All potential failures would have a thermal sign. Lining on a tunnel about to collapse? Easily spotted. Dam or slope having seepage? Spotted.

This phone is worth ten times the cost for those who need it. I still wouldn’t drop it, though. That sucker could knock off a toe!

I think we need this in the modern world. It should operate through 30 cm/s, and should be such solid ground that the pgv can't even get that high. It's important that all the ancillary equipment (electricity and such) also meets that standard.

Before I retired, I was on a nuclear CSA group. I wanted to go this route, declaring a pgv for the design, so that the old company could just buy a reactor. Unfortunately, massive self interest prevented this. I never went back.

The new Darlington refurb is ignoring seismic, they are just replacing with the same old junk, from the 40 year old seismic study. This is the exact opposite.

Monday, November 14, 2016

Going through the NZ plots is giving me a headache. Obviously, they like to keep their secrets. I found two plots with very high accelerations for the pgv. This means they are on rock, unlike the earlier ones I showed which are on soil

Such clean signals, no complexity in the mechanism here, no double event. So although you might expect damage at 0.2g, the pgv is low, so no damage. Until I see maps, I'll never prove this, but I'll bet they'll have no correlation with pga and damage. Only pgv will work. Smart people know this, but lots don't.

ps. the earthquakes are marching up that hidden fault. Next one a bit higher. A few more, then the m9, but maybe in 30 years.

pps. This is Wellington on soil

Note, the longer displacement plot - lots of low frequencies.

ps3 - a station on the middle of the fault hit 1.2g but no pgv yet. Most likely on rock.

This is what I've been saying for years. The mapped faults that the busgus loves are the losers of the earthquake world. No earthquake would be caught dead riding them. The real stuff is deep and can only be imaged with seismic reflection. Barring that, you can get hints from topography. The footwall is solid rock and forms a line, the hanging wall is broken up and most likely eroded away. These faults cannot be 'mapped' on the surface.

This is the perfect example, but we have a lot of this around Toronto, and the whole ENA. Anyway, I'm not after those 'surface fault' guys, they'll soon be gone by the hand of my friend - Mr. DumpyTrumpy. :)

Sunday, November 13, 2016

I'm putting together my 'Octocore' accelerometer, but I have added a magnetometer for earthquake lights, magnetic pulses, bird scarings, etc.

A beautiful chip and it follows the accelerometers in getting the signal to the raspi3.

Here is a video of the signal when I wave a small magnet around.

The noise is probably from the computers and such. Nevertheless, this is something that could record what is causing earthquake lights and bird flights. Nobody else seems to be interested in this sort of physics. I am proposing that there is a clear magnetic signal before a big earthquake like this, and having tons of these instruments around is the only way to figure it out. I'm hoping that the doomed Clintons will be interested. :) Trumpie wouldn't know physics if something fell on his head. Anyway, this is my dream.

I'm also adding this to make an interesting signal for future development. I'm not getting any seismic signal up in boring old Toronto, unless it's the thumps from the housing market collapsing. :)

I remember every detail because it was so painful for me. We had our starter house near High Park, with two kids and one almost popping out. We wanted a bigger house and looked for months. The price of our little house at the top of the boom was $265 thou. No offers. The big crash was in progress. I kept reducing the price, knowing that the bigger houses were also crashing. I aggressively reduced right down to $200, and got an offer from new buyers who were going to split the house. With this in hand, we went after a house priced at $300, and had the agent nail them about the crash, and they hadn't sold in a year.

We made the deals and survived the crash. On the other hand our investment guy decided to go all Kruger on us and dumped a rental investment on us that was worthless, and we lost a lot of money. Got most of it back with a lawsuit, and income tax. Yeah! This was the life of a crash.

Last month a standard Unionville house was going for $2.3 million, with people killing each other with offers.

Today -- no offers.

Let's look at physics of froth, and a crash. It all has to do with hot money, which is the oxygen for a wet wood burner. It's only 20% of a market, but it's enough. Hot money (hm) is defined as very twitchy international money, which is probably also very dirty. Hot money piles in and whooshes out very quickly, even down to a few days. Every country and every commodity has suffered from this. hm comes in when money is made very quickly with no questions asked, like the tulip bubble.

BC started the crash when they went all poopie over hm. The feds were suddenly looking at bc realtors who were laundries for huge amounts of dirty money from China. This was the first shoe. The second shoe dropped when they declared war by their tax.

The final nail in the coffin for Toronto was with election of Trump. This was now major war against China. Hm not only stopped dead, but the worst thing is that hm is always willing to take a haircut to get out, mainly because they got other places to go. So for Toronto housing, we first get all the oxygen cut off, they then take away all the dry wood. This is an immediate 20% price cut.

When this happened with the big US crash, the central bank dropped interest rates by more than a factor of 2. This allowed people to keep their houses with a 20% cut, and soon hm was coming back, and then everybody and their dog stretched themselves with houses.

We don't have that interest rate leeway. Toronto housing will drop 20% but then what? There are things to look for: frothy condos, all glass, all balconies, costing a couple mill. The last one sold out Before Trump (bt), but you look for the next one. Don't forget that they sell when it's all paper, so they can just fold up their tents and walk away. It's hard to find out these things.

The big crash all depends on the distress of people caught between houses without conditional offers, which was the norm this past year. This will crash the prices 50%. This will take months to figure out. Right now, people are in shock, and holding on to their high prices. The first thing is that sales volumes will drop tremendously, like in BC.

And all you young people, don't be happy that prices will drop. The last couple of years, the only things hiring young people have been the banks for processing housing loans. Ha! The banks will soon be calling in all their business loans to cover housing.

This a Trump Earthquake. The real earthquake will be in Oklahoma, and then Toronto will get worried about earthquakes. Nobody will touch a cheapo condo because it is a seismic death trap. Price goes to zero.

Reports are now coming in that it has an intensity of 9. That's major damage. However, most of Christchurch is reporting a 5, which isn't much. Everything that can be knocked down there, has been knocked down. I can't find the mechanism yet, but it looks like a shallow strike-slip. It will be an interesting earthquake since I'm sure they laid down more accelerometers, and there may be brick buildings that have been seismically upgraded using standard methods. The first earthquakes shattered the myth that this actually works, but everybody still does it. I hope they lifted some brick buildings on screw piles, I'd love to see what this does.

NEWS! Boosted up to 7.8

This is a rare subduction zone upward thrust. Mostly they are large displacement downwards.

You never see this. That's why we are getting Intensity 9's, which is as high as you can get with housing. For the 10's and higher you need to see things thrown in the air.

ps. the best videos so far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJeEAPTBPQg

Saturday, November 12, 2016

I like to make extrapolations from a single point. A relative's house in Unionville was expected to have riots in the street, and so many offers you couldn't stuff them in. But nothing. This is the definitive sign that Toronto is crashing. When the big wall goes up we'll all freeze in the dark. That's what the foreign Chinese are thinking, and now staying away, putting their money into the Euro.

I predicted Oklahoma earthquakes with their very first one. I just forget that I'm wrong 90% of the time. But you heard it here first. Toronto has crashed. :)

From Jane Austen, this is my collection for all things trumpy. I am hiding from the search engines, and I never want to be a 'featured collection' again. Such a nightmare trying to police a collection with 35,000 people. If that happens again to any of my collections, I'm killing it.

Today's news is the death of the EPA, which was the only agency capable of stopping all the oil tanks in Cushing from draining or blowing up. Next is the busgus. That gives the Oklahoma Earthquake Mechanism a big smile. Although gorming is destroyed, which good, the earthquake thing is bad. You can be sure that physics will never be important here. :)

Friday, November 11, 2016

OK earthquakes are picking up again, just when I thought they would hibernate for the winter. I suspect that everybody is going nuts with fracking, with you-know-who in the captain's chair.

Plus we've got New Madrid perking up. All of this activity means I'm calling for a big quake before Christmas. I'm still high on my last successful prediction, that I'll say it's a 6, simply because that's more interesting than another 5. Been there, done that.

But for a 6 to be interesting, it has to be a shallow one, those deep-sixes we've had are forgettable. Since this is all sarcasm anyway, I'm calling for a shallow 6 that will knock down at least 3 abandoned downtown cores, composed of ridiculously tall, thin brick walls. Nobody will be killed because nobody lives there. :)

ps. the EPA is gone. Opec will soon be gone. This express train is on the rails!

I cannot rave on enough about the home-roasted coffee. This was the coffee that brought on the Reformation, and took us out of philosophy-science. We've been had by commercial coffee roasters. There must have been some conspiracy since the 50's to siphon out caffeine for coke. With a couple of cups I'm bouncing to the ceiling, I have tons of intellectual energy, and no old-man snooze today. I went out for a big hike and lunch. Wooo hoo! Nobody would have accepted gorming if they were drinking this stuff. I expect it will be illegal soon. :( Hope I can sleep.﻿

I bought the last of the only coffee roaster that sort of works. They're all on it because it blows up a lot. This will be squashed by starbooks and declared illegal by the dea. I can't stop writing..... aaaahhh!

I'm also turning on my Chinese Laser Christmas lights today. Apparently, if you take off the casing, the 3 lasers can burn through the house. It's only the diffraction gratings that are saving you and air traffic. Now, with the coffee, I feel like taking it apart.....

** all sarcasm

But soon trumpies will kill all the lawyers, so I don't have to put on the following legal things.

ps. The starbooks also started the belief that dark roast was stronger and more caffeine. Hogwash! Dark roasting takes out all the caffeine, so they might as well suck it all out before the roast. Hear that, Tims?

pps. Tomorrow I'm drinking less coffee...

and extra ps. For almost a year, this has been one of my most popular posts, Here is the Amazon link

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Yeah, we can go all trumpy now. Everybody buy huge pickup trucks with shotgun racks. Gasoline is free!I can now go out of the closet. I used to say that gorming has no physics, but they hijacked the word 'science'. I can put on my bumper sticker 'My Science Follows the Scientific Method'. I'm going to take back the original meaning of the word.Actually, that meaning only dates from the Reformation, when humanity came out of the Dark Ages. Before that, Science, was philosphy. I'll call that Philosophical Science, or PS. That followed ancients like Aristotle. Their ps was observing correlations and making obvious, folksy conclusions. And then they dared anybody to try to knock it off the pedestal. We got the Sun around the Earth thing, and 'Ether is space'. They would conclude that a small ball, when dropped, fell slower than a big one, and they would never experiment because the 'ps was in', with a 99% consensus.

AAAHH! I'm killing this article. It only leads to torture by the Gorming Inquisition. I never wrote it and it doesn't exist. ....and yet it does.

Monday, November 7, 2016

Red tag all the damaged buildings. Do not approve any damaged brick building for re-occupancy. Remember Christchurch where they approved the office building and it pancaked in the next quake, killing everybody. Unless you plan on suicide real soon, do not be the scape-goat. This was 15 cm/s, the next quake will be bigger, you can count on that.

Civil servants are approving the bridges by sniffing them or some such thing. They'll always be okay, because it goes through 10 levels of approval, and nobody is accountable. Red tag everything. :)

I would only approve if I had done a seismic noise test before and after. There was also that building in Taiwan, damaged and approved, made out of tin cans. Lots of people died in that, after another quake.

Yeah, we got ourselves 15 cm/s (corrected) and half a g (high frequency, doesn't count), and a complex earthquake. That's two, two, two earthquakes in one! That makes the damage a bit higher for the magnitude, but two earthquakes only changes a decimal place on the magnitude, and I always round to a single digit because of these messes. An m5 is nothing to the coming m7.

A single clean earthquake gives a simple velocity pulse. I don't think the birdies would fly because they see magnetic fields with their eyes, and they were asleep. My instruments would have caught that pulse. Also, they catch the pulses in Tulsa with the big EM setup, but they're staying out of this.

This won't crack the oil tanks, but it would sure as heck weaken them for the next quake. Now they'll shut the wells again, which they did before, only to let them open in a week or two. Such fun with the rightie trumpies. :)

Also the new OK seismologist is supposed to be there. Is he under his desk?

CORRECTION

The airport got 15 cm/s. That's almost the worst shaking of the big Japan earthquake. That for sure damaged the tanks, but who can tell if it isn't totally ruptured. The will go on as if nothing happened.

You can't see the doubling as much here. But like I said these jump up by factors of 10, not 10% :)

ps. Had they done a seismic noise test on those brick buildings, they could now do another one to see if it had softened up. As it is, they'll have a guy, probably worse than the guy who approved that Christchurch building, look for cracks and such. Then he'll say it's all wunderbar. Actually, in litigious US they'll never find that guy. Maybe Boak will do it with his 'simple geology person' expertise. :)

On my main machine, I always use the latest kernel, and 'testing' packages. This works well for a year, and then you start to get errors that have been recorded since 2005. That's the time to completely reinstall a new Debian. I use the 'live' install with all firmware (non-free). I just did it, and now I'm converting all over to 'testing'. It helps to have disk drives for backup, then you don't lose all your configuration.

So, if you start getting stupid errors, then it's time to bite the bullet. My other machine running stable never needs this.

ps. AAAH! I'm dying. This is my 5th reinstall today. I want to do so much, like a new kernel, going to testing, etc, that's it's constantly blowing up. The order is important here, and I can't remember anything from last time. :(

pps. Here's the final recipe for future reference.

Get Debian Live install, KDE, with non-free and firmware.

get aptitude. install build-essentials and kernel package, and ncurses5-dev

build latest kernel, use 'kitchen sink' default -- make menuconfig

test things, reboot

Plug everything in, activate nfs, and 'make localmodconfig' -- takes out an hour or two off compiling

No wonder I was having trouble sleeping. Little did I know there was a big OK earthquake, m5, int 6. This was a shallow oblique strike-slip, with a normal component.

Felt by thousands, this earthquake may 'rig' the election. It is a reminder that trumpyism will get you bigger ones. This probably didn't do anything to the oil tanks, we have to wait for a shallow thrust m6 for that, but that's just the next step.

This did set off a whole bunch of earthquakes throughout the mechanism, including poor old Kansas who think they can avoid trouble. Not a chance. This general instability indicates that we are lot closer to the m7 than we think. :)

There are the two OK accelerometers at Cushing. The probably only read 1 cm/s PGV.

ADD: Lots of damage in Cushing. Records aren't out yet, but now I'm guessing 5 cm/s. The oil tanks will need 20.

Sunday, November 6, 2016

This is a fun article, showing the original maps. If we were to take the threat of a big earthquake seriously, then we would look at these old maps. Hydraulic fill is just dirt dumped into water, and is the worst for earthquake amplification. When we have our m7, nothing on it will stand.

These maps show how the natural fill from the lake currents stand in relation to the modern city. All the big towers and condos have foundations that go down to rock, so they should be ok, except for soft-story condos.

I especially like how unfilled the islands were. Early settlers stole all the boulder lag from the Scarborough Bluffs, and this added greatly to the islands.

Saturday, November 5, 2016

ATTENTION ALL OKLAHOMA! We know you are going to vote for the harasser, but if you do, Mama Nature is going to be pissed. It's all your right-wing, non-secular voting that got you into this, in the first place.

The last few days have shown a lot of activity, when it should be settling down for the winter. When the shoe drops, this is going to be the Big One that will make New Madrid look like a tea party. After you vote, set up a tent, away from your unsecured chimney, and watch the election results. Watch for the birds, then hold on to the ground for dear life.

Thursday, November 3, 2016

My relatives are retiring in Huntsville and selling their house around Toronto. Normally, that's not a big difference to go to hot Muskoka, but their house is in even hotter Unionville. They should clear a bit of money.

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

OK earthquakes have been on the general decline since the price of natural gas tanked, but there is still some fight left. This was an oblique strike-slip, normal fault mechanism, which means it is one up on the 'Whimpy' scale. It also means that it is underrated, so that's why I am calling it an m5. An Intensity of 6 should mean at least one chimney down. This might be the last hurrah before the Spring.

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

I voted for Rob Ford, and when he first came in, the city jumped. They were probably all afraid everything would be contracted out, which it should be. Anyway, they created a 311 email service that got things done. I had an amazing time, since you could never get through by phone.

**Digression - My son in California got his driver's license stuck in the wrong place because he is Canadian, and his status flip-flops like a Trumpy statement. It is stuck in the paper inbox of a one person office who only puts it on the top if you get through by phone. Otherwise, it is never done. The voice mail always states there are 50 people before you. This is what Toronto is going back to.

I tried to get through to the guy who stole the Ford name to get elected, but he has a person who says that nothing is his job. A very nice living, somewhat like me. :) But I'm just venting.

**Digression2 - Another dog, almost identical to mine is always jealous about her frisbee. So I talked the guy into just letting her go. They had the most horrendous 'bitch' fight (true sense of the word), and I took the frisbee away. They stopped and ignored each other. Nobody hurt and they vented. :)

ps. I'm all calm now. As the Great Timpy says "This is all sarcasm, and never happened." :)

pps. Wow, today the inspector came to look at that wonky foundation, and the city trimmed the tree that was whapping the hydro lines. The next thing you know, they'll be thinking earthquakes, and turning Port Hope into a nuclear research centre. :)

So, as long as that plume in the Pacific keeps hitting California, and the North Pacific current is dead, we'll be gardening at Christmas. The Earth lost a lot of heat with the El Nino and we are still bleeding infrared, according to this latest plot.

Obviously this can't go on forever, and we'll pay the piper, but it is amazing. Well, I'm off to do gardening. :)